The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Wireless communication technologies are constantly evolving leading to improvements in new wireless standards for communicating data. For example, multiple wireless standards, such as GSM, W-CDMA, and LTE, have improved one over another in delivering higher data rates and better quality of service. Each of these standards co-exists with one another providing users with wireless coverage throughout the world. However, each of these wireless standards operate at different frequency bands.
Wireless clients need to support each of these frequency bands in order to support the different wireless standards. Voltage controlled oscillators (VCO) are an important component of a multi-standard wireless client, which are used for handling and generating signals in different frequency bands. In order to support multiple frequency bands, multiple VCOs are typically used. However, minimizing the amount of additional hardware is critical in a wireless client, since as the number of wireless standards increase, adding hardware for each of these standards becomes prohibitive in terms of cost and area. In designing a VCO, design constraints such as, cost, area, power consumption, and phase noise need to be considered. Therefore, it is difficult to design a VCO which meets all the required constraints while also supporting multiple frequency bands.